Perhaps poets alone are the best qualified to
comment on poetry. The rest of us only make noises.

Perhaps. Because not being a poet myself, I do not claim
to know for sure if they are so qualified. I guess that as a community of
craftsmen they are afforded special insights into each other’s work - out of a
certain communion that the community makes possible.

The title of the book (Song of Maize) itself lets you in on something. It betrays the
expectation of the romance of the rural. In terms of numbers too, just two
poems (‘Song of Maize’ and ‘The Song
of Corn on the Cob’) out of 55 treat
of the rural. And the title poem (or song) speaks rather of the disintegration
of the rural, which appears in the farmer’s alienation from his lands and
crops:

Now
they’d visit us only once in a while

As if their hearts had landed somewhere else

We’d stare without a wink waiting for them. (48)

This perception of the rural probably explains the
choice of the rather unrepresentative title: it lends to the choice the edge of
sharp irony.

Chauhan’s sensibility, as it emerges in the book,
is definitely not rural. And this is so in spite of his sympathies and
nostalgia for the village. His sensibility is urban, though not metropolitan.
Memories of the village he has left behind survive, to ply him with an
abundance of refreshing images; yet the landscape in which he moves is
unmistakably urban.

That, however, does not mean he is comfortably
settled in this landscape. He is incurably unhappy, finding himself like “a
camel in a metro” (‘Camel in a City’ 82) or ruing over “an office packed full / of empty clerks” [emphases mine] (‘The City and I’ 83).

The rural background, then, paradoxically survives
for him as a mine for images to ironically capture the urban banality.

Another significant thing about the poet is his
gendered, even unselfconsciously masculinist, sensibility. Is this a hangover
of the older romantic conventions? There are shades of Batalvi’skudi (girl)
in “That Girl of My Childhood” but one who would wake up at the magical touch
of her Prince Charming. In some instances, Chauhan’s women/girls are
hermeneutically inscrutable like encrypted, seductive poems; in others, they
are like the hoardings of poverty alleviation or self-help programmes,
over-exposed but not quite real. The woman in “That Woman” (70) remains
unrealized for a different reason: her conflicts remain at the level of potentiality
in the poem, and as a result she is rather hastily and peremptorily contained.
The motivation of this neutralizing operation may be psychoanalytically
glimpsed in the ostensibly unrelated reference to her “supple breasts” – the
maternal organs that hang ambivalently, evoking both fear and desire, over the
poet’s “flying sky” (39) across several poems, including ‘A Curvaceous Woman’
(30-1).

The refusal to allow conflicts to rise to the
surface informs also Chauhan’s social sensibility and determines his strengths
as well as limitations. The question of social disparities appears in a number
of poems. It is there in the title poem also. In ‘They Come Like
This’ its violence is confronted head on:

The
system of the slaughterhouse

knows of only one difference

between one head and another:

the difference of strong and weak necks. (35)

A reversal is accomplished in ‘An Evening of a
River’ in which the city appears as an encroacher advancing menacingly to
swallow the huts of the poor (75). ‘Today’s News’ seems, particularly towards
the end, to be conducting a dialogue with Pash, but
its muted radical streak inhibits it from turning into a fireball so that it
glows gently, though indignantly, like a firefly instead (57). This could be
perhaps viewed as an exemplar of aestheticized vision taming the volcanic fires
of radical tradition. It is the poet’s romantic, aestheticized vision as an
observer, not an agent, bearing witness to history as an ambience in
transition, not as a project of transformation.

The awareness of reading translations of poems
written in Punjabi engenders, at least for me, a pervasive sense of loss, for I
cannot help imagining at the back of my mind what the original would be like. I
think the rhythm and the spontaneous sweetness of the original suffer
inevitable degradation in the process of translation, even if the translator
here happens to be the poet himself. The short, maxim-like poem ‘Ants’ should
adequately exemplify this (29).

Chauhan’s poetic range is impressively wide. There
is nostalgia in ‘Days of Jehlum’, tight-lipped
reflection in ‘Poem and the Gun’, adulation in ‘You’re Behind Each Flower’,
irony in ‘Portrait of a City’, impressionist images in ‘Flowers of Tears’, and
the unusual complexity of memories of hatred, betrayal and violence intertwined
with beauty in ‘A Raw Cut’. The poet’s remarkable sensitivity to life’s humble
situations comes out in ‘Teddy Bear’, ‘An Imaginary Toy’ and ‘Dark Groping for
Light’. In the last of these three poems, he evokes the poignancy of such
situations with his characteristic understatement:

But the mother keeps awake, long.

The father too is awake,

in the loneliness of a far city,

in his room, with a bed, a trunk

and a set of dress.

In a different register, the understatement
becomes excessive and yields what may be described as an inverse hyperbole:

A very innocent error on its roads gets

crushed under the wheels of speed.

This profiles my city’s portrait. (‘Portrait of a
City’ 24-5)

It is this ability to hold his ground while
playing with language which allows the poet to create a perfectly balanced and
quietly white-hot political-philosophical parallelism:

Those
who own this earth were never children

and those who do not

would never be grown-ups. (‘The Earth’ 60)

Yet when it comes to disclosing the nature of
poetry, the poet’s self-conscious meditations fade before poetry’s luminous
moment of unconscious self-disclosure. And poetry emerges as a consumer of the
spectacle, in spite of the poet (‘The
Poem’ 80). Well, that would not happen but for the poet: for he steps aside to
let the poem be.